Fragments from the 'Middle Ground' - Posidonius' Northern Ethnography

In this research seminar paper I will discuss the ways in which the writers and rhetoricians of the High-Imperial era adopted and adapted elements of ethnographic writing into their discourse of cultural belonging. The knowledge-ordering and social-identity-building aspects of the ancient uses of ethnographic - or rather, ethnographic-looking or ethnographically presented - information are foregrounded. What is intended by picking a certain selection of ethnicised exemplars? What are the implied associations triggered by the selection? Why are contemporary groups omitted in favour of antiquarian ones – or the other way around? And what was the degree to which inherited ethnonyms or ethnic categories were still ‘good to think with’? Another big question, so far quite seldom explored, is the connection and position of ethnographicising gestures within and in relation to the register of technical writing in antiquity. Throughout the paper I will in particular pay attention to how the Roman administrative divisions, primarily provinces, begin in the High Imperial period to obtain a degree of ‘entitativity’ – the quality of being naturalised entities of stereotyping – and emerge as meaningful frameworks of ‘common knowledge’ instead of the previously more narrowly ‘ethnicised’ categories. This would have highlighted the already-existing Greco-Roman tendency to think about population groups in an ‘essentialising’ fashion; an ideological pattern which resulted both from inherited literary tropes and some of the most elaborate technical theory-building of the ancient world – particularly the climatological, astrological, and physiognomic ones.

Traditionally conceived as an exclusively literary genre predicated upon stark polarities between “Greeks” and “Barbarians”, ancient ethnography might seem to encourage the view both that ethnic groups and boundaries were clearly perceived in antiquity and that these were often identified and categorized according to variations in material practice. However, whilst we have ample evidence that ancient Greeks associated material objects with specific identities, close examination of ancient ethnographic interests reveals a body of thought and enquiry encompassing a wide variety of media and genre incorporating Greeks and non-Greeks alike. Far from being a convenient prop upon which to base essentialized notions of “Greek” or “barbarian” culture, discourses of identity and difference were socially constructed and historically contingent. Like material artifacts, their analysis requires close attention to the specific frameworks and contexts in which they were created if we are to understand their full significance in the wider processes of identity construction. In both cases, the complexities surrounding their origin, mode of production, adoption and reception make it difficult to avoid labels, ethnic or otherwise, that aren’t subject to the same “play” of difference characteristic of all modes of cultural production (Hall S. 1990).

Ancient Ethnography. New Approaches, 2013

ere was no ethnography of religion in antiquity. 1 e reasons are straightforward: ethnography was not a discipline, and there was no ancient concept of religion. What we usually mean by ancient ethnography is in fact ethnographic writing, the written traces of a much wider discourse about the 'unity and diversity of mankind' . 2 Traces of ethnographic writing can be recovered from histories and geographies, and also from drama, epic poetry, elegy and the novel, philosophical dialogues, satire, medical treatises and more besides. Sciences did exist in antiquity. Mathematics, physics and astronomy were all de ned spheres of study, each with their canonical literatures, and it was even possible to write of physikoi, mathematikoi and astrologoi and so on, even if few were paid for their labours. But ethnography-as-a-science is a modern invention. 3 As for what we include in the term 'religion' , ancients were perfectly able to write about cosmologies and rituals, as well as about the temples and images of the gods; but they did not reify 'religions' as we do, treating it as a separate sphere of life or eld of enquiry. My aim in this chapter is to ask how these religious matters entered into ancient ethnographic discourse, taking as an example a text that has sometimes been presented as the most accomplished piece of Roman ethnography, and in the phrase 'interpretatio romana' has provided the material for a highly in uential paradigm of religious contact and cultural translation.

This paper studies the ways in which – and the aims for which – ‘ethnographicised’ information or topoi are wielded across differing second-century genres in the Greek- and Syriac-speaking East. The paper’s source texts represent four second-century authors (Polemo of Laodicea, Claudius Ptolemy, Lucian of Samosata, and Bardaisan of Edessa), as well as referring to the rebuttal of Celsus by Origen, which casts interesting light upon the monotheistic doctrinal disputes within which ‘ethnicised’ themes became increasingly used during the Later Antiquity. Common to all of these texts is that they stem from the cross-pollinating exchange of ideas, theoretical structures, and rhetorical tropes which took place in the context of the Imperial Eastern Mediterranean, facilitated by common language and almost as widely shared common understanding of how ethnographical-seeming details could help to build a winning argument – no matter what the occasion. Inter-generic interactions are evident in many stages of the ancient tradition of ethnographical and ‘ethnographicising’ writing, but the often antiquarian-seeming elements about population groups that are time and again recirculated in Imperial literature have not been extensively studied in terms of their rhetorical and epistemic underpinnings. Their usefulness seems to be confirmed by their constant presence in a variety of registers, and essentialist – often physiognomic – arguments could be deployed both about individual characters and broader group characteristics alike. The orators of the ‘Second Sophistic’, represented by Polemo and Lucian in this paper, found many uses for the technique of keeping provincials ‘ethnic’ for the purposes of their own arguments. The technical literature represented by Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos – and to a certain extent the surviving evidence for Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of the Countries – found much use for essentialist representations of provincial character(istic)s. Origen, hailing from Alexandria like Ptolemy did, demonstrates in his rebuttal of Celsus’ True Discourse (Orig. Contra Celsum) the freedom with which the supposed ‘ethnic’ antiquities of a number of peoples could be put to use in expositions which had very little to do with ‘real’ ethnography. Identities and religious affiliations are also crossed among this selection of writers in ways that highlight important dynamics (and ironies) associated with the ‘conditioned co-opting’ of provincial backgrounds into the ranks of cultural/doctrinal insiders. Lucian and Bardaisan are Syrians, but while Lucian is in many ways comparable to Polemo, a native of Laodicea, in his approach to the cultural belonging as a ‘sophist-as-Hellene’, Bardaisan has some points in common with both Ptolemy (in terms of his astrological subject matter), and Origen (in the moralising argumentation that pervades his cultural critique). Social and personal interactions become thoroughly enmeshed in some of the examples of rhetorical one-upmanship and self-fashioning involved, whether we are dealing with sophistic set-pieces or doctrinal disputes. For such agendas, the cultural and phenotypic plurality of the Empire’s provinces formed a common pool of ‘embodied knowledge’, to be used when necessary by the learned writers.

Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96-235: Cross-Cultural Interactions, ed. Alice König et al. (Cambridge University Press), 291-308, 2020

I will present two case studies of a Late Antique and an Early Medieval text which chose idiosyncratic ways of operating between the polarities of Christianity and paganism when describing the wisdom traditions of outgroups or ‘ethnically presented’ past groups. The cases are those of the Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus and the Cosmographia Aethici of ‘Pseudo-Jerome’. At the first glimpse, there is barely anything linking these two texts, beyond the fact that both are written in a Latin that is idiosyncratic to say the least. There are, however, some interesting commonalities between my two texts today – and they come particularly to the fore when attention is paid to the way both Ammianus and Pseudo-Jerome handle the theme of barbarian sages and the pagan wisdom tradition – the ‘alien wisdom’ of Arnaldo Momigliano. One important shared aspect is that both of these writers inhabit a doubled role in-between paganism and Christianity. In some ways, the Cosmographia is trying to conjure up the world that Ammianus operated in, but from a Merovingian point of view.

In this article, we examine Greek and Latin sources dealing with the Far West of the oikouméne, notably the symbolically charged area of Gadeira and the region of the river Guadalquivir. Our main interest, however, is not that of geographical or historical reconstruction, but rather the ideological motives behind the selection and treatment of the information. We identify a number of historical periods and contexts which were especially involved in the creation of the popular image of the Far West, and explore the connection of this image with their material or symbolical interests in the area. Through this, we pay special attention to what is not said, believing that absence of information about places which were relatively well known can, in certain contexts, be as ideologically charged as what is overtly said.

The purpose of the present article is to show that the hermeneutical activity of Lucius Annaeus Cornutus is best characterized as " ethnographic " rather than merely " allegorical " or " etymological ". Without denying the presence of both these dimensions in the philosopher's exegeses, the paper suggests that Cornutus' analyses aimed first and foremost to excavate the ancient world picture that the philosopher believed to underlie the theology transmitted by Homer and Hesiod. Thus, the philosopher regarded conventional mythology and traditional religion as sources of information about the primeval accounts of the cosmos: his analyses of various etymologies discovered not merely the origin of the word in question but also the origin of the ancient cosmological conceptions. Consequently, interpreting myths was for Cornutus tantamount to gaining profound insights into the pristine theology that was skillfully developed by the wise men of antiquity and poorly transmitted by the poets. Cornutus' hermeneutics built on the assumption that interpreting mythology provided the interpreter with a better understanding of not only the ancient world but also the present one. Etymological analyses of the gods' names and epithets belong undoubtedly to one of the most interesting and, at the same time, controversial developments within Stoic philosophy. While the purpose of these investigations was to extract the ancient world view that according to the Stoics underlay the theology transmitted by the poets, such analyses formed an integral part of the Stoic physics. By viewing traditional mythology as a prefiguration of their own cosmological doctrines , the Stoics came to treat conventional myths as important sources of information on the primordial beliefs about the gods and the cosmos. Thus, examining a given etymology would provide the philosophers not only with information about the origin of the word in question.